David Mamet has frequently admitted that he was an ineffective actor, even a terrible one. As recently as May 2002, when asked how he could direct something he could not do himself, in this case magician Ricky Jay's 2002 magic show, On the Stem, Mamet responded, “It's not much different from acting. I certainly cannot act, which anybody who has ever seen me attempt it can tell you.” Furthermore, in 1996 he also confessed in Make-Believe Town that he “was a terrible acting student.” Rather than give up the theatre, however, he became first a stage director and then a playwright. Actually, before he tried acting professionally as an adult (he had been a child actor in Chicago and performed at the Hull-House Theatre in the early 1960s) and while a student at Goddard College during the late sixties he wrote several drafts of early plays, including Sexual Perversity in Chicago. Few failed actors have substituted one career track for another - or in Mamet's case, two others - with such stunning success. Ironically, Mamet has often stated that he began writing plays not so that he would become a recognized writer but in order to provide young actors with illustrations for points he was making in his teaching and because his first theatre company, the St. Nicholas, could not afford to pay royalties.